While leadership development is considered an important goal of education on many campuses, very little is known about how leadership skills develop in a diverse environment, which most colleges will be in the future. We compare causes for Socially Responsible Leadership (SRL) at the end of college students' first year in one diverse liberal arts college, finding a crucial role for (the quality of) peer interactions and relevance of out of-classroom experiences. How students interact with diverse peers has a high bearing on the extent to which they develop leadership skills